November Expenses – $1055.78

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for November.

November was a another good month for expenses. I would have made my monthly goal of $1000 if it were not for the $111 doctor bill I paid during the month. When I switched to employer insurance in September my deductible reset which was bad for me since I had already met the deductible on my marketplace plan. If I still had my marketplace insurance the doctor visit wouldn’t have cost me anything. Even before meeting the deductible on my marketplace plan doctor’s visits were a set $35 a visit.  On the plus side, my employer insurance is an HDHP which will allow me to open an HSA and put some money in there before the end of the year giving me a tiny bit of tax savings.

My monthly food expense was way too high again. If I had kept that expense to a reasonable $100, I would have made my $1000 goal. I ate out nearly every day and sometimes twice in a day. My plan was to cut back on my food expense in November. Obviously, I didn’t follow through on that. I’ll make that my plan again for this month and I intend to actually follow through on it this month. I don’t have any travel planned this month and I have a fair amount of food in my apartment so it would be easy to keep my food expense low if I just don’t go out to eat too often.

I had a little bit of travel expense this month due to my four night trip to Las Vegas. I had already paid for one night hotel.  This month I paid for another hotel night and had two nights comped. I also had a Lyft ride to the airport, a bus pass from the airport, and paid to select my seat on my Spirit flight to Las Vegas.  Added to the expenses I previously paid I still paid well under $100 for four nights in Vegas, including round trip airfare from Kansas City.  I won about $40 gambling so the trip ended up costing me about what I would have spent if I had just stayed in KC during that time.

How was your month?